


your sacred stars won't be guiding you

by contagionangel



Series: i'll be your detonator [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Antics and Shenanigans and Bonding, Gen, Hunk is surrounded by people with lots of issues and little self-preservation, Pre-Slash, Very Brief Violence, Worldbuilding, implied crushing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 15:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9447728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contagionangel/pseuds/contagionangel
Summary: In one reality, a major change in long-past history means that, among other things, Shiro never crash-lands on Earth.Hunk still gets attached to the people he'll end up going to space with.A story of friendship, alien coverup conspiracies, and starting to grow courage without noticing.





	

Truth be told, he hadn't known Pidge well enough to actually want to go bother him in the middle of the night.

 

And he mostly went along with it because, well, that meant Lance had a point about bonding.

 

Pidge seemed like a pretty stressed out little guy. Maybe he just liked being alone and keeping to himself, but maybe he could use a Lance, Hunk had reasoned. Not just the Lance you got in charge, but the Lance who'd hummed the Mission Impossible theme the first time he herded Hunk to the commissary.

 

He'd complained that it was a boring way to use their time, but he'd sat there on the counter swinging his legs and letting Hunk make sandwiches as Hunk complained about alloys, compounds, tensile strengths and elemental structures, and occasionally some radiography.

 

And he'd only laughed a little when Hunk confessed to believing in magic. Or at least sufficiently advanced science, and maybe in things they'd be using to do incredible things before they fully understood them.

 

Here's what he learned, the night they followed Pidge, creeping in the shadows through a route out to the roof that neither of them had known about before: either something is weird with Pidge, or...something is weird with Pidge.

 

They're living in a golden age of growth of technology, the news says. Terraforming In Our Childrens' Lifetimes. Nothing seems new or different to him, mostly because he's grown up with the recruitment posters, but ultimately, there's a lot of fame and money in potential space travelers and their support teams.

 

And a lot of that money is a big potential paycheck from a declared-neutral zone in New Mexico, where they have to prove they're the best. Leaders of a new generation of spacefarers.

 

 _There's things out in the stars the way we used to dream of things in the sea,_ nana had said, and it’s considered as loony these days to believe in meeting aliens someday as it is to believe in magic, but-- he remembers the way she taught him to coax machines under his hands, the way a dab of mustard could create a colloidal suspension, the science in gluten strands and the love in food.

 

Item: Lance is, some jerk behavior aside, someone Hunk is friends with. He doesn't seem to realize the significance of being kept around despite, oh, multiple strikes for sneaking around an actual military base. The way they're never told how they were caught, but there's hints laid out.

 

Item: Pidge has built reception equipment that would make one of Hunk's professors weep. All officers need to know how to maintain and repair their own gear, especially in emergencies, but this scrapped-together tech is using theories Hunk has only peeked at.

 

Item: Pidge might actually be spying on aliens halfway across the galaxy. The setup has the look of continuous nigh-desperate improvement.

 

"I was hoping that I'd only have to scan to the edges of our system," he'd said, nearly glowing in the starlight. "But the best I could get was a survey marker, updated-- I had trouble breaking down the encoding on the date system, but based on tagging it appears to correlate to the oldest known star that we've seen long-range. Not that I’ve translated it yet."

 

"Hunk, tell him he's crazy." said Lance.

 

It'd taken over a half hour of coaxing Pidge into bragging about his build notes-- if Hunk had built this stuff atop the Garrison, undetected, he'd be dying for someone to brag to about it, if he wouldn't be dying of terror every ten minutes-- to get to the point where Hunk's at, pacing, gesturing, and finding out exactly how serious this neurotic little guy is.

 

"I think he might not be crazy." said Hunk. "I'd have to see more." He’s breaking into a cold sweat, really, because for how enthusiastic Pidge is, it's scary. Because the aliens from stories that he'd think of are terrifying.

 

Lance gave a frustrated gesture, groaned the same groan he would if Hunk's quiet torrenting or flash-drive swaps didn't include another Eighties Classic. "C'mon. Don't tell me we're going to be taking shifts of you nerds trying to eavesdrop on aliens."

 

"What?" said Pidge.

 

"We're supposed to learn to be a team." Lance had said, crossing his arms. "Is this gonna take all night, or do we have time to jack a ride to town for greasy diner food?"

 

"I can make better in the commissary. And we're less likely to get caught." Hunk reminded him.

 

Item: if Lance hadn't been insistent on going to bother Pidge and try to drag him into sneaking out, there wouldn't be _two_ people getting their dirty butts on the commissary counter, as if they don't need to leave it looking untouched except for the missing ingredients.

 

So he swears to secrecy over what is, to him, a damn fine sandwich.

 

* * *

 

Lance always wants to go try and pick up girls, and Pidge always wants to look for aliens, and Hunk always wants to be cooking or working on machines.

 

They don't settle in at the Garrison. Things get worse. Somehow, that bonds them more than anything, and for all that he complains Lance never fails to cover for them.

 

At one point, Hunk mistakes the battered notebook laying around for Pidge's working notes, and he's known Pidge long enough by then to set it aside and pretend not to have seen it.  He still hopes that Pidge brings some of the things in it up before long-- there's something weirdly personal about the quest that drives Pidge to sit out under the desert sky all night, acting as hacker, cryptographer, and tracker all in one.  

 

It’s worrying, this manic quest of his for distant information, to find the fates of a living legend, a respected scientist, and a researcher who could have become a rising star.

 

Lance picks a fight with Pidge one night, wanting to head to the sports bar in town while Pidge wants to observe the unusually active radio chatter-- and there is radio chatter, ironically some kind of commentating on what sounds like sports matches, statistics and sparse commentary flashing in ones and zeroes. 

 

He calls Pidge crazy again, asks if Pidge is really, really serious, but this time Pidge barrels into him, and Hunk ends up having to frantically drag them apart.

 

“Friends don’t try to beat each other up.” he says, anxious. “Please. I can’t deal with stuff like this.”

 

Lance’s nose is bloody. Pidge’s lip is split, and there’s blood mixed in when he spits on the ground.

 

“I think I’m gonna sit this one out tonight.” says Hunk, rummaging to pull out a sandwich to leave by Pidge to hopefully soften the lecturing. “Like, man, I can see that this is really important to you, and I’m-- I believe you. About aliens.”

 

“Wait, you believe him?” says Lance, pinching at his nose and making faces. “Jeez, Pidge, what did you do that for? Was that to prove you’re not an evil mad scientist, because, I don’t think I deserved that. It _hurt._ Uh, my feelings. And maybe your hand.”

 

 _Where did he learn to hit like that?_ Lance mouths at Hunk as an aside, turning to mask his grimace of pain.

 

“I didn’t ask for your help.” says Pidge, but there’s a slight waver in it. “I never asked you guys to follow me up here.”

 

“There’s something you’re not telling us, man, and--” Hunk looks away. “I dunno, it might help if you talked to us sometimes. You talk a lot but you don’t really say much. Help me understand.”

 

Pidge goes quiet. Hunk can’t read his expression through the glare off the glasses, but then he’s pulling them off, and Hunk can’t read the expression under them either.

 

“You could have turned me in for this.” says Pidge. “Having this equipment on base breaks international treaties. Why didn’t you?”

 

Hunk and Lance look at each other. “Did you know that about the treaties, Hunk? I thought this was just like. An embarrassing side project.”

 

“Oh my god.” says Hunk, covering his face with one hand. “I’ve only complained about it, like, a dozen times, thanks for listening, Lance.”

 

“Well, I knew it was breaking some rules.” says Lance, looking at them oddly. “You’re saying that this is a big deal and not some kind of-- nerd knitting circle?”

 

The expression on Pidge’s face is stony in the starlight and faint glow of monitors. Hunk’s big, bad feeling gets worse, punctuated by the unnatural stillness and quiet of the desert night.

 

“I have something I have to show you.” says Pidge. “It’s-- I got it out of the Garrison’s files. Matt--”

 

He clears his throat.

 

“Crewman Matthew Holt had an experimental device rigged that was sending sound and video logs back to a server in the Garrison workshops.” he says. “He didn’t tell-- uh, anyone because he wasn’t sure if it’d work or not. It was based on unproven theories. He wanted to use the months of logs as proof.”

 

“And?” says Lance. “How do you know about it?”

 

Pidge looks him in the eye. “I’ve found the last known words recorded from the Kerberos mission crew. Today is the anniversary of their disappearance.”

 

Hunk pulls out his headphones and Pidge lends Lance his. “Really?” asks Lance. “Why wouldn’t they have put it online? The Kerberos Mission was a big deal.”

 

They watch the video, listen to the chatter of the crew as they pull samples. It’s got moderate compression, but it’s still impressive, that it managed to transmit all the way from Kerberos.

 

Then the video goes choppy and they listen to the screams.

 

Hunk’s blood runs cold.

 

Pidge backs up to a frozen frame.

 

“I’ve cleaned up the image a little.” says Pidge. “This is as good as it gets. But tell me, what does that look like to you?”

 

“That looks like maybe an _alien ship_ abducted the _Kerberos crew_.” says Hunk. “Nope. Nope. I’m too young for this.”

 

“You could have made this.” says Lance, arms crossed, but it comes out weak.

 

“That’s what the public response would be if I released it without proof.” says Pidge. “It took me a couple of tries to find it. You’ll have to take my word for it unless you plan to snoop on Commander Iversson’s computer yourself, and the security on it is no joke, even for me.”

 

Lance scoffs. “I’m pretty good at getting in and out of places. Just saying.” he says.

 

“Your funeral.” Pidge mutters. “If you get caught, you didn’t hear it from me, okay?”

 

* * *

 

Somehow, Lance doesn’t get caught.

 

He still ruffles Pidge’s hair and calls him their crazy little dude-- but he quietly idolizes Takashi Shirogane, still did even when he believed that pilot error caused the Kerberos crash. And he knows Pidge couldn’t be faking obvious skills in front of an engineer like Hunk.

 

The name ‘Shiro’ is in the video, which is probably the tie-breaker.

 

Lance saves dragging them to town for when even the professors comment on the circles under Pidge’s eyes. He also tries to teach Pidge about skincare, but mostly gets ignored.

 

* * *

 

A year of grind in, with Hunk and Lance skipping leave because funds for traveling home are tight, and they're middling in their classes, too good to cut loose but all too often the butt of object lessons. It takes a year for him to put together the pieces that lead him to an unreviewed draft of a dissertation by a Katherine Holt. The math work in it looks awfully familiar.

 

But Pidge Gunderson doesn't talk about astrophysics and only meets the minimum in computer sciences. Just like Hunk doesn't believe in magic, and Lance only has girls and fast-flying machines on the mind.

 

Regimented time, sneaking around for contact with home, and possible government coverup conspiracies make him feel like he's waiting in terror for the other shoe to drop.

 

Pidge seems to run off of barely any sleep at all, and Hunk is definitely sleeping less than he should.

 

Even with three people, and Hunk being able to carry a lot more than Pidge, they’re running out of room to set up. Hunk definitely believes in aliens by now, and believes even less in the institutional authorities he’s under than ever before. But-- they’re hitting a wall. They need _something._

 

When one of Pidge’s small-hours salvage runs leads them all to a Texaco at three in the morning, eager for terrible processed snacks, Lance runs into a _something_ , or tries to pick a fight with someone over the last gas station hotdog, which might be the same thing.

 

Keith is there, still has an emo mullet, and apparently also has an interest in finding aliens, and apparently _also_ has an actual desert survivalist conspiracy shack where he’s been studying previously-undocumented ancient carvings on cave walls.

 

He gives off pissy vibes and has a straight-up giant knife tucked into the back of his belt, but after he tries to leave Lance on the porch for being called a desert murder hobo, he doesn’t like, stab him or anything. He just looks particularly angry while Lance insists on pushing past into his _home_.

 

“I couldn’t find much on interpreting the walls, but they tell a story and use star charts for calendars.” says Keith. “I...could have swore I read this one right, but it seemed to be saying something significant was supposed to happen last night.”

 

Hunk doodles it in his field notebook on a whim. “Hey, mind if I sort the candy while we talk?” he asks. “This is a candy bar mood kind of conversation.”

 

Keith eyes him uncomfortably. “I...guess?”

 

“You get used to it.” says Pidge. “He processes while he works on things. So there’s a linguist who everyone said must have faked these tablets that he translated-- a Rosetta stone type thing for what everyone said were meaningless drawings, but they had a--"

 

“Mathematical precision.” says Keith, shifting. “Yeah, that’s what I’m working off of, but I only have some of his notes, and I’m not much of a...reading guy normally. I just. Felt like it was important.”

 

“Didn’t you always have to bring your scores up with the practicals?” asks Lance. “What, were you like Pidge and secretly hiding some big science and research thing from the Garrison all along?” He sounds aggressively skeptical.

 

“No, the language just-- makes sense to me.” says Keith. “Uh, do you guys want to go have this conversation out by the fire? I just came in to get my notes out.”

 

“I _do_ like fire.” muses Pidge.

 

Lance chimes in occasionally to raise an eyebrow, cross his arms, tell them to make something make sense. It’s clear that Keith is making it through the academic part of his desert quest on sheer will alone, which is impressive enough, but from what Hunk remembers Keith was more of the ‘do things and make things happen’ type than the ‘study linguistic theories and look for historical evidence of aliens’ type.

 

And junk food is great and all, but the way Keith wolfs it down, how he looks as sallow as Pidge from sleeping days and talks in a rusty voice like he hasn’t spoken to someone in forever--

 

He’s surviving, but not thriving. He always seemed like a fairly decent dude, if wound up a lot into his own head, and Hunk wonders what it’s like to have that big drive of _purpose_ with no safeties on or supports, because even he and Lance can only do so much to keep Pidge getting _some_ eat and sleep, give Pidge an outlet so that there’s no explosions of temper in class or meltdowns otherwise.

 

Lance has been subtly less animated since Hunk started to get on board with the aliens thing, since whatever he found on the Commander’s computer. When he comes back to himself, it’s always trying too hard, fake and abrasive. But he bickers with Keith wholeheartedly and _real._

 

* * *

 

“Nana,” he says on the payphone outside a 24-hour grocery, “I feel like I’m losing my mind. This isn’t like anything I’ve dealt with from friendship before. Now it feels like I’m trying to keep this whole genius ball of crazy fed and alive, I’m seeing them in my _sleep_ , I don’t even think of anything else anymore.”

 

Her voice comes through, low and smooth. _“Them, hm? Is that what...they...use, or are you dodging something?”_

 

“No, no, nana, _them_ like I’m talking about three of my friends who I’m _not_ dating.” says Hunk. “They’re all, like, wicked good at something, and probably going to get in a lot of trouble, or do something amazing together. If one of them needs help I forget to be scared like a reasonable person.”

 

 _“_ _You’re not involved in anything wrong?”_ she asks. _“I can’t picture you doing something you find unethical.”_

 

“It’s more like I’m not sure I want to, but I think it’s the right thing. And I’m starting to have trouble picturing doing anything else.” says Hunk.

 

She hmms. _“Well, either you’ve accidentally joined a cult, or-- hear an old woman out-- it sounds like love.”_

 

Hunk’s cheeks flare hot and red. “Nana!” he hisses. “They’re my friends. And there’s _three of them_.”

 

 _“If one of them is that Lance boy, it’s definitely love. I didn’t say it had to be romance.”_ she says reasonably. _“But from the sounds of it, you’d follow him to the moon and back. And you told me he’s cute.”_

 

“I think I might follow them all to the moon and back.” says Hunk glumly. “And they’re all cute. It’s unfair. Even greasy and gross they’re cute. Never tell any of them that.”

 

He leans on the wall.

 

“Thanks for hearing me out, nana.” he says. “I know I should call more often. I think-- not everyone knows what it’s like to have someone steady who’s there.”

 

She chuckles a little. _“You’ve grown into a fine young man.”_ she says. _“I’m incredibly proud of you. If you love them, then they_ do _have that.”_

 

There’s a loud sniff that Hunk is surprised to hear comes from him. “Really?” he asks.

 

 _“None of them will ever be good enough for you, of course.”_ she says primly. _“But you’re very skeptical and fair. I’ll trust your word on whether they’re worth following to the moon and back.”_

 

“I’m let you know when I figure it out.” he says, looking at the stars, thinking about his best friend and his other best friend and his maybe-friend, wondering where their madcap quest is going to take them. “Goodnight, nana.”

 

 _“Goodnight, sweetheart.”_ she replies.

 

For a long moment after, he stares at the sky. “What else are we gonna find?” he asks.

 

It doesn’t answer, so he heads into the store after everyone else and hears himself start to ramble about texture and flavor profiles as he fills up Keith’s basket, while Keith gives him a baffled look like he’s never gone grocery shopping with someone before. The verbal essay gets cut off when he dashes to stop Pidge and Lance from rocketing down the aisles on a shopping cart.

 

Even to his own ears, his nana is right. It sounds like love.

 

* * *

   
**The end.** (Or maybe the beginning.)

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to Gareth, the cute bear who lives in my basement.
> 
> I'd have edited this better with a beta. There's maybe a big AU worrying at me, and this is a part of it, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it.
> 
> Assume all differences from canon are divergences due to it taking place in an alternate reality from canon.
> 
> Thanks for reading.
> 
> __  
> [[Outtake/cut content from Hunk digging up info about Katie Holt:
> 
> Also known as a temperamental, antisocial theorist who disappeared from academia sometime while working on not one thesis, but three, at age seventeen and with no prior degrees. Opinions varied on whether nepotism got her where she was, or whether she was just that much of a wunderkind, with a rarity of peers. 
> 
> She’s been implicated in illicit datamining activities and major private information leaks three separate times, although no charges have been made.
> 
> He hasn’t found any images yet, and he’s not sure how to ask.]]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] your sacred stars won't be guiding you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12972432) by [graycalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/graycalls/pseuds/graycalls)




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